Posted
by
timothyon Friday March 29, 2013 @07:06PM
from the other-people's-money dept.

MarkWhittington writes "Included in President Obama's 2014 budget request will be a $100 million line item for NASA for a mission to capture and bring an asteroid to a high orbit around the moon where it will be explored by astronauts. Whether the $2.6 billion mission is a replacement or a supplement to the president's planned human mission to an asteroid is unclear. The proposal was first developed by the Keck Institite in April, 2012 and has achieved new impetus due to the meteor incident over Russia and new fears of killer asteroids."

Only when you count Bush going to the ranch that was his personal property from before he was elected, then yes. Somehow, I don't think Bush was charging the Office of the President for time spent there.

Since all the money will be spent here on earth, they can have fountains, Rolls Royces, and Yachts just by doing banker tricks with all those fundsthat Boeing and General Dynamics and lowly technicians deposit from the NASA contracts.

But why should we spend money on an asteroid capture mission when there are still banks that need fountains in their lobbies? Priorities, people!

Man, those fountains are to be built with the funds saved by scrapping the Death Star [whitehouse.gov] project - the one estimated at over $850,000,000,000,000,000.
Priorities indeed! $100 million worth of fountains in bank lobbies is simply LAME, the banks would be ashamed to display them.

This is a program designed to be cut, to show that this administration is being 'fiscally responsible'... I expect many such 'pie-in-the-sky' projects to be proposed, only to be cut at the altar of fiscal responsibility... And blame the minority party for the cut as well.

Hey, if they can count as savings the money they don't spend on wars that have ended, why not propose wild plans to pump up the savings?

Do you know how much (in inflation-adjusted dollars) we have saved since we stopped fighting the Second World War these last 65+ years?!?!?!

An effective troll leads in with a worthwhile comment ("designed to be cut") and descends into crazy land. WTF happened after "altar of fiscal responsibility"?Anyway, the "need to cut the budget" nonsense is from both parties, largely the Republicans driving the discussion. Same old same old. Obama likes to play centrist, which practically speaking means letting Republicans wield more influence than they should. In this environment, the idea of budget-cut fodder makes a ton of sense. It might even b

In February, when Obama released his fiscal year 2013 budget, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget criticized the president’s plan for relying on savings from winding down the two wars. Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan group, called it a “gimmick.”

“There are a number of good policies in this budget, but the use of this war gimmick is quite troubling,” said MacGuin

Nice trolling. You had me thinking someone could actually believe that crock of conservative bullshitting until it got overwhelmingly stinky. Next time, try leaving out the part blaming the poor for our financial problems instead of massive wealth disparity and the part where you accuse the DNP of paying bribes but ignoring the bribes taken by the GOP to keep taxes minimal for economic predators and job destroyers.As far as the 1.4 T$ wars fighting a distraction war against a minimally powerful and relative

The stink is the corruption of your thinking from a lack of economic understanding and the numbers involved in the situation. What you are advocating for the US will lead to a collapse in the same way, and for many of the same reasons, as the Soviet economy collapsed in 1991. Let us pretend that you could tax the rich as your post suggests. The result is explained very nicely by Bill Whittle in "Eat the Rich": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=661pi6K-8WQ [youtube.com]

catching a 7 meter 500 ton space rock has nothing whatever to do with diverting dangerous asteroids or killer asteroids or even the mostly annoying asteroid that broke Russian windows. Real asteroid diversion would use tutally different tactics over many months or years, provided early enough warning was had.

The purpose is to get more votes. How much of a mission do you think they're going to get from $100 million anyway? Or even $2.6billion, which makes the assumption that NASA will actually get that money.

catching a 7 meter 500 ton space rock has nothing whatever to do with diverting dangerous asteroids or killer asteroids or even the mostly annoying asteroid that broke Russian windows. Real asteroid diversion would use tutally different tactics over many months or years, provided early enough warning was had.

Maybe, maybe not. The Bag-it-on-the-fly technique has been proposed for larger bodies as well. And we have enough space junk floating around the planet to practice on. You always start small. Its a practice mission at best, with a payload of manageable size.

The rock that broke up over Russia was estimated at close to 10,000 tons. NASA currently believes the Russian meteorite was about 49 feet in diameter, or 15 meters. We never saw it coming.

150 tons of that rock is rocket fuel. That is a handy thing to have at L2 if you want to intercept another earthbound rock. L2 is the ideal fuel depot for this. 150 tons is not enough, but it is a significant start.

It's a handy thing to practice catching, and a handy thing to have in orbit to practice refining fuel, but L2 is not the place to do it. L1 and L2 are extremely unstable, you have to continuously consume fuel to remain there, though you can reduce the amount by orbiting them. L3 is better, but on the opposite side of the primary. L4 and L5 are where you can actually store stuff stably - that's where asteroid fields tend to naturally accumulate.

Where are you getting that 30% number from? Chrondites are believed to have formed in the outer solar system where the minerals were shaped by water, but I know of no direct evidence that inner-system chrondites still contain it in appreciable quantities. Ice is unstable within the solar frost line, which lies partway through the asteroid belt beyond Mars. It will tend to have sublimated off any near-Earth asteroids.

Assuming it does contain water one of the the major purposes of such a mission would be to

Okay, sure hydrates are (potentially) a viable source from which water can be created, but they they aren't actually water any more than cellulose is gasoline. Same elements, different chemical structure.

Right, the mostly annoying half megaton explosion that injured over a thousand people and hospitalized over a hundred, and caused tens of millions of dollars of property damage. Most of the damage was broken glass, but it did manage to collapse the roof of one factory. If it had managed to last another half a second or so before exploding, it probably would have killed a hundred thousand or more people. I guess, in the grand scheme of things, that might only count as mostly annoying, but not to the people who live there.

Right. No big deal as medium-small asteroid impacts go. Had it instead come in at a steep angle and hit a city it would have done some damage.

Think of it this way - if we had seen it in time, and had the proven tech to divert it, would it have been worth the effort to divert? Probably not, much cheaper to replace some windows. Even a direct impact would only be mildly annoying unless it hit near something sensitive, might even through up enough dust to do a little local cooling and cloud seeding. Even

get real, 17 meter asteroid hit the ground once every century. usually in places where there is no one. even north russia is mostly full of places where there is no one had such a thing "come in at steep angle". you'd likly have a pretty hole in the ground for tourists, that's all.

and only the products moved where needed. we would not play with little rocks

Begging the question again.

I think it's not at all unlikely that we'll play with small rocks and just throw them wholesale into a solar smelter. When you have basically unlimited energy to work with, and virtually no worries about pollution (at least, waste disposal is easy) the whole game changes.

Obviously a misspelling of A-stereo-naut... where they send two twins into space to stand slightly apart from each other so that everything happens on your 2D TV in 3D as you watch it. (You just need some red and blue glasses to view it).

L2 is even more precious as it is the only fairly stable spot in the Earth-moon system where if you're not careful you fall into interplanetary space. Every other place but this requires significant delta-v to escape the Earth's or the moon's gravity. Here though, just drift a little too far from the moon and away you go.

Well yeah, L4 and L5 are more stable. L2 requires station keeping - but not much. I don't think L1 or L3 would be very useful. You got me on the falling out piece - I had forgot. I should think habitations at L4 and L5 where they won't fall out, refining and fuel depot at L2. Anyway, as long as we're talking about exploring the solar system on a low energy budget, I suppose folks will want to read about the Interplanetary Transport Network [wikipedia.org].

L1 is between Earth and the Moon. That makes it quite useful for anything going on between the two, like communications networks. It also makes a great anchor point for a space tether (something which could be made with current materials!) from the Moon.

L3 is just like L2 though a touch closer to Earth. You can park spacecraft out there with modest station keeping issues. The L2 advantage is that it's line of sight with the far side of the Moon so you can either park spacecraft that hide from Earth (when

I think you mostly nailed it - L1 is great as a pass-through point for a lunar elevator, which could potentially extend all the way down to geostationary orbit, obviating the need to each orbital velocities for an Earth-Moon transit. Probably *the* prime piece of orbital "real estate". Not really anything special otherwise, after all the Earth and Moon already have line of site with each other.

An L2 halo orbit would be handy for communication with the far side of the moon, though a simple collection of 3+

Rotovator/Skyhook type rotating elevators are demonstrably better in mass ratio, transit time, and meteor exposure than a stationary elevator.

Assume you want to take off and land from the Moon, and your rotating elevator is designed for a comfortable 1 gravity at the tips. Lunar orbit velocity @ 280 km altitude is 1560 m/s. To have an equal rotation tip velocity @ 1 g you need a 248 km radius. Thus the tip becomes motionless over the Lunar surf

Personally I envisioned a rotovator (fine name, I'll have to remeber that) where the tether ended in a secondary adjustable-length tether on a long winch that could be extended to almost graze the surface at the "touchdown" point, allowing it to lift objects directly from the surface where their motion would be completely predictable, minimizing the coordination complexity. You'd just need some sort of maneuvering thrusters at the very end of the tether.

Earth-moon L3 is on the opposite side of the earth from the moon, as you know. It's a nice spot for a telescope to look for NEAs. As you pointed out it's not stable. Therefore it's not a good spot for a space station with human inhabitants. Yes, it would be a good spot for a LH2/LO2 distillery with good 0-energy transits to L2, as that sort of operation could manage their stationkeeping by changing the orientation of their thermal outputs. But refining is a messy business that messes up telescopes, so

Human's have to get out there. Not as entertainment, but because if humans remain exclusively on this rock and in near earth orbits, humans are a sitting duck. The lessons learned in getting humans into low earth orbit, then high earth orbit, then to establish permanent bases on the Moon and Mars, are going to be used to develop longer term programs for human interstellar travel, exploration and in time colonization.

Or we can just develop robots to go out and do that for us and roll over here on earth and give up.

Seriously, wouldn't sending a handful of robotic spacecraft to characterize larger asteroids be much more worthwhile? While it could be argued that astronauts on the surface of Mars with good geologic training and tools could be more productive than a robot, I'm not sure what value sending astronauts to such a small asteroid in lunar orbit really adds.

The asteroids that really threaten Earth are an order or two of magnitude bigger -- a hundred meters to a few kilometers in size. A 7 meter asteroid may give us some insight into their composition, but it would be better to actually go an analyze the actual type of asteroids we are worried about. Knowing details of their structure and how they are held together could immediately eliminate some solutions for diverting their course if the need ever arises and provide insight that could spark creative solutions that haven't yet been thought of. This kind of work could actually be done much cheaper with robots than astronauts if what we really care about are actual results.

Probably not - all the science that's been done by all the Mars rovers combined since the first one touched down years ago could have been done by one person with a pack full of tools in a few days - for the next few decades at least humans will be far more versatile than any robot. The only problems are that keeping people alive for extended periods in the radiation outside of Earth's magnetosphere is a major challenge, and even if you get them to Mars safely you then need to deal with either the potentia

Probably not - all the science that's been done by all the Mars rovers combined since the first one touched down years ago could have been done by one person with a pack full of tools in a few days

Bullshit. First of all for the mass budget that a single human on mars surface needs we could send dozens of mars rovers. Not just one. Secondly you still need to send the rover. A small set of tools does not include the quite fancy lab in remote car ever sent! Fact is we don't need people there to do science. Really what can that person do that a rover can't? Walk faster? Well that was about mass budget, which you total blow with a soft flesh bag that needs air food and water.

There really was no point. Really. It was a cold war pissing contest. Yay we can piss further than those evil commies!

Proof however is in the pudding. Can you buy a ticket to the moon? Thing is this sort of mission, and apollo are the worst way to achieve what most space enthusiast dream of. In fact its a road block to it. All that it will achieve is a massive budget for select few to do very little science.

It fails to give general access to space. It fails to deliver science for the price. It could ac

> Seriously, wouldn't sending a handful of robotic spacecraft to characterize larger asteroids be much more worthwhile?

If you design the asteroid tug right, after it returns with the first one, you can refuel it and sent it out to get another. If you use plasma (VASIMR) type thrusters, you can use oxygen as propellant. You need 2-3% of the asteroid mass as fuel, and asteroids are typically 40% Oxygen. Therefore once you get an extraction plant working, the mining is self-sustaining on fuel. You just

We should be looking at getting the technology to capture LARGE asteroids instead of planning a mission to mars. If we use government funds to push private industries into getting a large rock with value into moons orbit it can provide us with a source of material to help us colonies space which is a much better goal than trying to visit mars with humans. We can continue use robots to explore mars while we work on mining space rocks for rare earths for earth and also for space and for a moon base. Perhaps i

Start small. We know almost nothing about asteroid composition, it's all theory and spectral analysis at this point. We catch something small, see if our theory holds water, and then make a try for something bigger and more profitable once e know we can pull off a capture rather than orbital bombardment. Comets provide a much larger challenge because they're moving much faster and are far more volatile, and even if we capture one we still have to figure out how to keep it from boiling away - the solar sy

I really wish that we would test out some technologies for diverting large asteroids so that we're not trying to scramble at the last minute when we realize something large is coming our way. I'd like to know for certain that we'll be ready for when we see something coming our way that could cause us some serious pain or even extinction.

Ok, so once the asteroid collector has delivered the asteroid to high lunar orbit, what does the spacecraft do then?

Well, if its got even a tiny fraction of its propellant left over (remember it just towed something maybe 100x its size clear across the inner solar system) , it slowly spirals down to low earth orbit and... REFUELS.

Now here's where things get interesting. Once it's refueled (remember its main consumable is up to 12,000 lbs. of Xenon, it gets its energy from solar power), it can do any number